Professors at CU offered some fantastic graduate level courses this semester. I took more credits than I should have including Data Science, Soil Ecology seminar, Restoration Ecology seminar, and Data Visualization. The seminars included reading scientific papers each week and discussing the ideas. For Restoration Ecology, we are working on two short opinion pieces for the SER call for short and spicy opinion pieces. This has been fun to put together with my lab-mate, Aly Ennis, and Sam Ahler. Data Science was geared toward ecology and evolutionary biology students and included algorithms for linear modeling. We used R, RStudio, and GitHub and conducted independent projects with Bayesian models. This was quite challenging for me, and I still consider myself a novice.
Data Visualization with Sebastian Kopf, a geology professor, was the best course I have taken at CU Boulder. Each week, students would bring an example of a published figure that they would like to replicate either with published data or with their own similar data. Seb would start at the beginning (data wrangling) and walk us all the way through to the final publication-ready figure in just one hour. This course also used RStudio and GitHub. The depth of knowledge that Seb has for plotting in R is incredible and it was awesome to see the coding style, techniques, and possibilities week after week. Truly inspiring! The Barger Lab renovation is almost complete. We now have a lounge space with a couch and table where we can meet all together. This week we started our Project Wall where we each keep track of the progress of our projects and communicate with one another about the overlap between projects or other issues we are having. We designed the wall with images from the website app.wombo.art which uses AI to generate beautiful imagery based on the words that you input. We've also considered including pressed flowers or dried mushrooms to represent the various projects. This winter break, I am preparing for my 5th semester exam which includes a <15 page proposal, a presentation, and questions from my committee. The proposal will be focused on a new topic for me, which I have been reading and preparing background information throughout the semester. The presentation is mostly about work I have already accomplished or will accomplish as my dissertation chapters. The highlight of this semester was my visit to the Forest-Rangeland Soil Ecology Lab with Dr.s Matt Bowker and Anita Antoninka at Northern Arizona University where we talked about exopolysaccharides in biological soil crust. It was a fantastic visit and all of the people there showed incredible hospitality and generosity to me. The biocrust community truly rocks!
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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